Make Your Product Better with Event Tracking in Smartlook

Page tracking tools like Google Analytics can give you an idea of how much traffic your website has and how visitors are browsing your pages. However, if you want to get insights about how people are interacting with the pages or you’re tracking a single-page application, then page tracking simply won’t do. In such cases, you need to focus on tracking events.

What is an event, and why should you care about tracking events?

An event is an interaction users have with elements on your page, like clicking on a button. When you think about tracking events, start by asking yourself what exactly you want your users to do and which actions can drive them there. You must have a solid understanding of your goals, including knowing what your users should do to achieve those goals. All of those actions or steps taken are events that should be tracked. For example, if one of your goals is to get users to upgrade, a click on an upgrade button in an upsell window is an event worth tracking.

It might be possible to do this in Google Analytics (GA). But let’s say you want to measure the performance of that upsell window, and the upgrade button does not change the URL. This makes it non-trackable with a page tracking tool and requires cooperation with your developers or a solution that can give you with the ability to track events and provide you data from your conversion funnel.

Of all the reasons you should use of event tracking, there are three that can be easily highlighted:

You can measure conversions even if your events are all in one URL.

Tracking how visitors are using certain features reveals interesting clues about their intentions, which will give you a better understanding of users.

It’s very useful for UX testing and assessment as it helps you decide which features to include or exclude.

Pretty interesting, isn’t it?

Does it make sense to combine event tracking with visitor recordings?

Yes. It’s very useful for when you want to search for recordings that show specific user actions rather than simply filter them according to the browsed page’s URL. You can filter recordings to show you the users that interacted with your page in a specific way, like clicking an “add to favorites” button. Filtering recordings by events can even help when you are looking at a visitor with several recordings and you need to find one specific recording in order to find a certain problem and solve it as quickly as possible!

How can you track events with Smartlook?

Those who have already tried to track events with GA are aware that setting up event tracking can be a somewhat complex process. In order to track events with GA, you need to come up with a tracking plan and present it to your developers so they can manually set up all the events to be tracked. You must then wait for deployment and, after that, you need to wait for the data. (Even if you set up the events yourself, the process is still a bit cumbersome as you have to do all the coding work, implement it on your website, and deploy it).

With Smartlook, tracking events is a much simpler process. The only code you really need to add is the Smartlook tracking code. On our new Dashboard (coming soon!), all events will be tracked automatically, and then you’ll get to choose which events you want to see aggregated data from. The best thing is that you no longer need your development team to play the middleman, freeing up their time for other tasks and giving you full autonomy.

That’s it! You now have access to your event tracking data at any time, and you can easily see the data retrospectively. You can see how many people have been using your features and buttons and also the context in which they use them (shown in visitor recordings). We at Smartlook understand that event tracking is key when it comes to offering you the best analytics solution — a combination of quantitative metrics and insights into the who, how, and why of visitor interactions.

What are your thoughts?

Feel free to reach out to us and let us know what you think. We look forward to receiving your feedback!